good evening, we begin tonight with two developments into the january 6th investigation. the first concerns john eastman, the trump lawyer who cooked up the scheme to overturn the election. the one that former white house attorney eric harshman told to quote, get a great criminal defense lawyer. we learned tonight that the fbi has seized his phone. eastman did nothing to dispel suspicion when he went before the select committee, took the fifth over and over again. i assert my fifth amendment right to being compelled to be a witness against myself. did the trump legal team ask you to prefer a memorandum regarding the vice president s role in the counting of electoral votes in joint sessions of congress, 26, 2021? doctor eastman, did you advise the president of the united states that the vice president could reject electors from seven states and declare that the president had been reelected? fifth. doctor eastman, the first sentence of the memo start off by saying tha
Administration, not only conducted by white house officials but allies of this white house want to know who anonymous is. How much weight is the white house taking these. You say theyre printing them out and basically showing them to him. Reporter my understanding is that, yes, he is, remember, this is a president who likes to have Cabinet Meetings where he goes around the room and Cabinet Officials and secretaries praise him for the work hes doing. This is very much in line and character with that. I will tell you, anderson, talking to sources close to this white house, i talked to one source earlier today raising questions about the strength of some of these statements coming from some of these Cabinet Officials. I think there is, in sort of the same way they were going through that New York Times oped searching for clues whether this person or that person wrote this
in the New York Times. There are allies of the president going through these Cabinet Officials wondering if theyre loy
We run everything straight by the book. Not sure what book hes talking about but not much book on governance that seems to be going on in this white house or anything this anonymous official describes. The president is said to be volcanic about it and said nothing this afternoon going to a trip to montana where he will be speaking tonight and Sarah Sanders spoke about this gutless loser and the times for being deceitful of this act and tweeted the times phone number. Sarah sanders called on him or her to come forward and resign. No takers so far. These are all the Senior Administration officials up to and including the Vice President who have denied writing the piece. Secretary mattis, and pompeo and dan coats and more than two dozen top officials in all, one exception Chief Of Staff john
tweet asking whether or not the journalists of the New York Times are going to investigate themselves and reveal who this anonymous source is. I can tell you talking to sources close to this white hou
names such as white house counsel, don mcgahn. cia director, gina haspel and even george conway, married to kellyanne conway and often trolls trump on twitter. it s not clear to us anyway it s somebody in the white house. he may be a guy inside the white house. he may be upper level, lower level, maybe he s in the old executive office building. reporter: the 538th, nate silver makes a living with predictions zeroed in on anti-trade, tweeting it made him wonder if it s someone in treasury or highly concerned with economic policy. whoever anonymous is, it s a whodunit tailor-made for tv. i m surprised by how good a writer ivanka is. reporter: randi kaye, cnn, new york. with me now is cnn chief political correspondent, dana brash and douglas brinkley, saw in randi s report.
randi kaye, cnn, new york. cnn chief political correspondent, dana brash and douglas brinkley, saw in randi s report. you ve been talking to sources, what s going on behind the scenes? it really is still an explosion of anger. what we saw in the initial outburst yesterday we saw in public when the president came out and talked about all the great things his administration has done, has become a little bit less so according to people i m talking to who are speaking to those in and around the president, and more kind of a i wouldn t say shoulder shrug but more of a hope that this is like so many other big explosions in the media that make the president look bad and ends up being sort of overtaken by something else that happens in the world and maybe something else that the president is